The Audience Ripple MapAim at one person and let the rings do the rest

positioning skill

Ask anyone who their audience is and you get a shape with no edges. Women in their thirties building something online. Small business owners. Creators. All true, all useless, because a sentence that fits forty thousand people makes none of them feel addressed. This is the thing I use to fix that, and it is the single most useful piece of software I own.

Hand-drawn illustration. An avocado has thrown one small stone at a row of tin cans on a trestle; the first can is knocked over and the others are toppling. On the ground to the left sits a heap of unthrown stones, labelled in red “thrown at everyone”. A black note reads “aimed at one” and points at the flying stone, an orange note reads “it goes over” above the first falling can, and a blue note reads “the rest follow” pointing at the cans behind it. — TL;DR

It is not a template. It is a skill you install in Claude. You open a chat, it interviews you for twenty minutes, and it hands back a file: who your work is aimed at, who stands around them, and what to publish for each. Free, and yours to keep.

the whole idea

Drop a stone, don't aim at the rings

Throw a stone into still water and the rings spread on their own. You don't aim at the rings. Their size is a consequence of the stone landing in one place hard enough to move something.

Content works the same way and almost everyone gets it backwards. A piece written for everybody displaces nothing: nobody recognises themselves, so nobody reacts, so nothing carries it any further. A piece written for one unmistakable person makes that person react — and the reaction is what carries it to the people standing next to them.

So you aim at one point and let the width happen. Width is never the input. This is the part people fight, right at the moment you ask them to narrow.

The fear underneath is always the same: narrow and you lose everyone else. You don't. Narrowing is who it is aimed at, not who is allowed to read it. The wider rings are exactly how everyone else still arrives.

what you end up with

The map

At the end you have a file. Not a conversation you scroll back through — a document you keep, open in three weeks having forgotten all of this, and still get a week's work out of.

One Impact PointThe exact person every piece is aimed at. Person-level specific, with the thing they are stuck on written into it — because a demographic never made anyone recognise themselves.

Four ripples around themProgressively wider groups, each one a nameable audience rather than a blur. With a line per level telling you how a piece for that level has to sound, and what it can assume you already know.

Proof they existThe part that makes this different from a well-formatted guess. It goes looking for these people before it builds anything around them.

What to publish, in what proportionYour next five pieces, each aimed at a named level, each with a job. Plus a tracker, so after ten pieces the data corrects the map instead of your instinct.

A boundaryWho you do not want to be mistaken for, and the two or three topics that look on-niche and will quietly pull you wide in month two.

Where to learn fromNamed places and people per level, with links. Topics come from the inner rings; craft can come from anywhere, any niche.

the bit I would pay for

It checks whether those people are real

Every audience exercise I have ever done ends with a confident paragraph about someone who may not exist. This one stops halfway and goes looking: can it find these people saying this, in public, in their own words? Is there anywhere they already gather? Is anyone already selling to them?

Three checks, a score out of three, and the score changes what happens next. Score badly and it will not build the map — it widens one notch and checks again. And it writes in the file whether each answer was verified or just something you remembered, so you can never mistake one for the other later.

Competition at your Impact Point is good news. It means someone already proved these people pay.

An audience you cannot find talking anywhere usually means the line is drawn somewhere real people don't experience.

take it

Download

audience-ripple-map.skill Claude skill · 46 KB Download

This one needs Claude. It is a skill, which is a thing you add to Claude so it knows how to run a specific job properly. It will not work in ChatGPT or anywhere else — the file is instructions written for Claude to follow. The free plan is enough.

five minutes, once

How to install it

All in the browser. Nothing to install on your computer, no terminal, no code.

Download the file above. It lands in your Downloads as audience-ripple-map.skill. Do not try to open it — it is not meant to be read, it is meant to be uploaded.
Go to claude.ai and sign in. A free account works.
Open Settings, then Capabilities, then Skills. The wording moves around a little as they update things — you are looking for the Skills section in your settings.
Upload the file. It appears in your list of skills and stays there. You do this once, ever.
Open a new chat and just ask. "Help me work out who my audience actually is." That is enough — it recognises what you are asking for and starts.

If it doesn't start on its own, name it: "use the audience ripple map". Works every time.

what it is like

Twenty minutes, one question at a time

It is a conversation, not a form. One question, you answer, it says back what it heard in a tighter sentence, then the next question. Fifteen to twenty-five exchanges for the full thing, fewer if you arrive knowing what you want.

Three things worth knowing before you start.

It will push you to narrow, and you will not like it. That moment is the whole exercise. It is not going to argue with you — it builds the map and lets the rings show you that narrowing did not cost you anyone.
Vague answers are fine. It does not demand a polished one. When you are woolly it guesses something sharper and asks you to correct it, which is faster than being asked twice.
Bring it back. Publish ten pieces, log them in the tracker it gives you, then open a new chat and hand the file back. It updates the map against what actually happened instead of rebuilding from memory. This is the part almost nobody does and it is where the thing earns its keep.

so you are not disappointed

What it does not do

It does not pick your topics, write your hooks, script anything, or audit the content you already have. It decides who everything is aimed at.

That sounds like less than it is. Everything downstream gets easier once that is settled, and stays guesswork until it is — which is why I keep putting it first.

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